Chapter 29
"And the end is near!" he said. "Yes, now, thanks to you!"
Thanks to her! And she must listen and submit to his touch!
"The engineers and material were ready to go in," he continued. "Before morning, as I had planned, we shall be so well fortified in the position that nothing can budge us. This success so strengthens my power with the staff and the premier that I need not wait on Fabian tactics. I am supreme. I shall make the most of the demoralization of this blow to the enemy. I shall not wait on slow approaches in the hope of saving life. To-morrow I shall attack and keep on attacking till all the main line is ours."
"Now you are playing your real part, the conqueror!" she thought gladly. "Your kind of peace is the ruin of another people; the peace of a helpless enemy. That is better"--better for her conscience. Unwittingly, she allowed her hands to remain in his. In the paralysis of despair she was unconscious that she had hands. She felt that she could endure anything to retrieve the error into which she had been the means of leading the Browns. And the killing--it would not stop, she knew. No, the Browns would not yield until they were decimated.
"We have the numbers to spare. Numbers shall press home--home to terms in their capital!" Westerling's voice grew husky as he proceeded, harsh as orders to soldiers who hesitated in face of fire. "After that--after that"--the tone changed from harshness to desire, which was still the desire of possession--"the fruits of peace, a triumph that I want you to share!" He was drawing her toward him with an impulse of the force of this desire, when she broke free with an abrupt, struggling pull.
"Not that! Not that! Your work is not yet done!" she cried.
He made a move as if to persist, then fell back with a gesture of understanding.
"Right! Hold me to it!" he exclaimed resolutely. "Hold me to the bargain! So a woman worth while should hold a man worth while."
"Yes!" she managed to say, and turned to go in a sudden impetus of energy. His egoism might ascribe her precipitancy to a fear of succumbing to the tenderness which he thought that she felt for him, when her one wish was to be free of him; her one rallying and tempestuous purpose of the moment to reach the telephone.
Mrs. Galland and Minna saw her ghostlike as she passed through the living-room, their startled questions unheeded. Could it be true that she had betrayed every decent attribute of a woman in vain? Why had the counter-attack failed? Because Westerling had been too strong, too clever, for old Partow? Because God was still with the heaviest battalions? Half running, half stumbling, the light of the lantern bobbing and trembling weirdly, she hastened through the tunnel. Usually the time from taking the receiver down till Lanny replied was only a half minute. Now she waited what seemed many minutes without response. Had the connection been broken? To make sure that her impatience was not tricking her she began to count off the seconds. Then she heard Lanstron's voice, broken and hoarse:
"Marta, Marta, he is dead! Partow is dead!"
Recovering himself, Lanstron told the story of Partow's going, which was in keeping with his life and his prayers. As the doctor put it, the light of his mind, turned on full voltage to the last, went out without a flicker. Through the day he had attended to the dispositions for receiving the Grays' attack, enlivening routine as usual with flashes of humor and reflection ranging beyond the details in hand. An hour or so before dark he had reached across the table and laid his big, soft palm on the back of Lanstron's hand. He was thinking aloud, a habit of his, in Lanstron's company, when an idea requiring gestation came to him.
"My boy, it is not fatal if we lose the apron of Engadir. The defences behind it are very strong."
"No, not fatal," Lanstron agreed. "But it's very important."
"And Westerling will think it fatal. Yes, I understand his character. Yes--yes; and if our counter-attack should fail, then Miss Galland's position would be secure. Hm-m-m--those whom the gods would destroy--hm-m-m. Westerling will be convinced that repeated, overwhelming attacks will gain our main line. Instead of using engineering approaches, he will throw his battalions, masses upon masses, against our works until his strength is spent. It would be baiting the bull. A risk--a risk--but, my boy, I am going to--"
Partow's head, which was bent in thought, dropped with a jerk. A convulsion shook him and he fell forward onto the map, his brave old heart in its last flutter, and Lanstron was alone in the silent room with the dead and his responsibility.
"The order that I knew he was about to speak, Marta, I gave for him," Lanstron concluded. "It seemed to me an inspiration--his last inspiration--to make the counter-attack a feint."
"And you're acting chief of staff, Lanny? You against Westerling?"
"Yes."
XL
WITH FRACASSE'S MEN
We have heard nothing of Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son, and Peterkin, the valet's son, and others of Fracasse's company of the 128th of the Grays since Hugo Mallin threw down his rifle when they were firing on scattered Brown soldiers in retreat.
It was in one of the minor actions of the step-by-step advance after the taking of the Galland house that the judge's son received official notice of a holiday in the form of a nickel pellet from the Browns which made a clean, straight hole the size of a lead pencil through his flesh and then went singing on its way without deflection, as if it liked to give respites from travail to tired soldiers.
"Grazed the ribs--no arteries!" remarked the examining surgeon. "You'll be well in a month."
"We'll hold the war for you!" called the banker's son cheerily after the still figure on the stretcher.
"And you'll get gruel and custards, maybe," said the barber's son. "I like custards."
Once the judge's son had thought that nothing could be so grand as to be wounded fighting for one's country. He had in mind then, as the object of his boyish admiration, a young officer returned from a little campaign against the blacks in Africa, when, the casualties being few and the scene distant and picturesque, all heroes with scars had an aspect of romantic exclusiveness. But there was no more distinction now in being wounded than in catching cold. Truly, colonial wars were the only satisfactory kind.
The judge's son found himself one of many men on cots in long rows in the former barracks of the Browns near La Tir. Daily bulletins told the patients the names of the positions taken and daily they heard of fresh batches of wounded arriving, which were not mentioned on the bulletin-board.
"We continue to win," said the doctors and nurses invariably in answer to all questions. "General Westerling announces that everything is going as planned."
"You must know that speech well!" observed the judge's son to the nurse of his section.
Her lips twitched in a kind of smile.
"Letter-perfect!" she replied "It's official."
In two weeks, so fast had the puncture from the aseptic little pellet of civilized warfare healed under civilization's medical treatment, the judge's son was up and about, though very weak. But the rules strictly confined his promenades to the barracks yard. There might be news coming down the traffic-gorged castle road out of the region where the guns sounded that convalescents were not intended to hear. For news could travel in other ways than by bulletin-boards; and the judge's son, merely watching the faces of medical officers, guessed that it was depressing. But after the first attack on Engadir their faces lighted. The very thrill of victory seemed to be in the air.
"It's in the main line of defence!" called the doctor on his morning rounds of the cots. "They've made Westerling a field-marshal. He's outwitted the Browns! In a few days now we'll have the range!"
How staggering was the cost he was not to realize till later, when the ambulance stewards kept repeating:
"More to come!"
A newcomer, who took the place of a man who had died on the cot next to the judge's son, had been in the fight. He was still ether-sick and weak from the amputation of his right arm, with a dazed, glassy, and far-away look in his eyes, as if everything in the world was strange and uncertain.
"The fearful flashes--the explosions--the gusts of steel in the air!" he whispered.
The next night Westerling followed up his supposed advantage at Engadir as he had planned, and there was no sleep for the thunders and the light of the explosions through the barracks-room windows.
"I can see what is happening and feel--and feel!" said the man who had been at Engadir.
In the morning the bulletin announced that more positions were taken, with very heavy losses--to the enemy. But the news that travelled unofficially from tongue to tongue down the castle road and spoke in the faces of doctors and nurses said, "And to us!" plainly enough, even if the judge's son had not heard a doctor remark:
"It's awful--inconceivable! Not a hospital tent in this division is unoccupied. Most of the houses in town are full, and we're preparing for another grand attack!"
Now for two days the guns kept up their roar.
"Making ready for the infantry to go in," ran the talk around the barracks yard.
After the infantry had gone in and the result was known, the doctor on his morning round said to the judge's son:
"You're pretty pale yet, but you'll do. We must make room for a big crowd that is coming and the orders are to get every man who is in any condition to fight to the front."
"And if I get another hole in me you'll patch me up again?"
"Get any number and we'll patch you up if they're in the right place," was the answer. "But be careful about that detail."
Soon the judge's son was with a score of convalescents who were marched down to the town, where they formed in column with other detachments.
"Not with that cough!" exclaimed a doctor as they were about to start, ordering a man out of line. "You'd never get to the front. You'd only have to be brought back in an ambulance."
An enlightening march this for the judge's son from hospital to trenches, moving with a tide of loaded commissariat wagons and empty ambulances and passing a tide of loaded ambulances and empty commissariat wagons. A like scene was on every road to the front; a like scene on every vista of landscape along any part of the frontier. All trees and bushes and walls and buildings that would give cover to the enemy the Browns had razed. On every point of rising ground were the trenches and redoubts that the Browns had yielded after their purpose of making the Grays earn their way by trenches of their own had been served. The fields were trampled by the feet of infantry, cut by gun wheels, ploughed by shells, and sown with the conical nickel pellets from rifles and the round lead bullets of shrapnel. An escarpment of rock, where the road-bed was slashed into a hillside in a sharp turn, struck by the concentrated fire of automatics, appeared to have been beaten by thousands of sharp-headed hammers, leaving a pile of chips and dust.
The traffic of the main roads spread into branch roads which ended in the ganglia of supply depots, all kept in touch by the network of wires focussing through different headquarters to Westerling. In this conquered territory with its face of desolation there were no fighting men except reserves or convalescents on their way to the front. All the rest were wounded or dead or occupied in the routine of supply and intelligence. The organization which had been drilled through two generations of peace for this emergency exhibited the signs of pressure.
Eyes that met when commands were given and received were dull from want of sleep or hectically bright as a hypochondriac's. Voices spoke in a grim, tired monotone, broken by sudden flashes of irritation or eruptions of anger. Features were drawn like those of rowers against a tide. The very proportions of the ghastly harvest after the last, the heaviest of all, of the attacks brought spasms of nausea to men already hardened to blood and death. If the officers of the staffs in their official conspiracy of silence would not talk, the privates and the wounded would. The judge's son, observing, listening, thinking, was gathering a story to tell his comrades of Company B of the 128th.
That night he and his comrade convalescents slept in the open. Their bodies were huddled close together under their blankets for warmth, while aching limbs twitched from the fatigue of the march. The morning showed that others had coughs which should have kept them from the front.
"Four or five cases of pneumonia due in that lot!" a doctor remarked to a hospital-corps sergeant. "Put them in empties right away."
After this announcement other coughs developed. Amusing, these sudden, purposeful efforts should one happen to think of them in that way. But no one did.
"No you don't, you malingerers!" said the doctor sharply. "I've been at this business long enough to know a real cough."
Now the judge's son and a dozen others were separated from the rest of their companions and started over a hill. From the top they had a broad view. Across a strip of valley lay the main rise to the heights of the range. Along the summit nothing warlike was visible except the irregular landscape against the horizon. There the enemy rested in his fortifications. The slopes, as far as the judge's son could see on either hand, were like the warrens of an overpopulated rabbit world in hiding. Here was the army of the Grays in its redoubts and trenches A thousand times as many men as were ever at work on the Panama Canal had been digging their way forward--digging regardless of union hours; digging to save their own lives and to take lives. And the nearer they came to the top of the range the deeper they had to dig and the slower their progress.
As the little group of convalescents descended into a valley a bursting shell from the Browns scattered its fragments over the earth near by.
"They drop one occasionally, though they don't expect to get more than a man or two by chance, which is hardly worth the cost of the charge," some one explained. "You see that they must know just what our positions are from their understanding of our army's organization, and the purpose is to bother us about bringing up supplies and reserves. Start a commissariat train or a company in close order across, and--whew! The air screams!"
Once on the other side of the valley, and the maze of zigzags and parallels leading into the warrens was simplified by signs indicating the location of regiments. At length the judge's son found himself in the home cave of his own tribe. His comrades were resting at the noon-hour, their backs against the wall of their shell-proof. In the faint light their faces were as gray as the dust on the dirty uniforms that hung on their gaunt bodies. Dust was caked in the seams around their eyes; their cheeks were covered with dusty beards. Their greeting of the returned absentee was that of men who had passed through a strain that left existence untouched by the spring of average sensations.
"Did you get the custards?" asked the barber's son in a squeaky voice.
"No, but I got a jelly once--only once!"
"Snob!" said the barber's son.
"Jelly! I could eat a hogshead of jelly and still be empty! What I want is fresh meat!" growled Pilzer, the butcher's son.
"A hogshead of jelly might be good to bathe in!" said the banker's son. "I haven't had a bath for a month."
"I have. I turned my underclothes inside out!" said the barber's son. He was aiming to take Hugo's place as humorist, in the confidence of one sprung from a talkative family.
Scanning the faces, the judge's son found many new ones--those of the older reservists--while many of the faces of barrack days were missing.
"Whom have we lost?" he asked.
The answer, given with dull matter-of-factness, revealed that, of the group that had talked so light-heartedly of war six weeks before, only little Peterkin, the valet's son, and Pilzer, the butcher's son, and the barber's and the banker's sons survived. They were sitting in a row, from the instinct that makes old associates keep together even though they continually quarrel. The striking thing was that Peterkin looked the most cheerful and well-kept of the four. As the proud possessor of a pair of scissors, he had trimmed a surprisingly heavy beard Van Dyck fashion, which emphasized his peaked features and a certain consciousness of superiority; while the barber's son sported only a few scraggly hairs. The scant, reddish product of Pilzer's cheeks, leaving bare the liver patch, only accentuated its repulsiveness and a savagery in his voice and look which was no longer latent under the conventional discipline of every-day existence. The company had not been in the first Engadir assault, but, being near the Engadir position, had suffered heavily in support.
"You were in the big attack night before last?" asked the judge's son.
"We started in," said Peterkin, "but Captain Fracasse brought us back," he added in a way that implied that only orders had kept him from going on.
Peterkin, the trembling little Peterkin of the baptismal charge across the line of white posts, had been the first out of the redoubt on to the glacis in that abortive effort, living up to the bronze cross on his breast. He was one of the half dozen out of the score that had started to return alive. The psychology of war had transformed his gallantry; it had passed from simulation to reality, thanks to his established conviction that he led a charmed life. Little Peterkin, always pale but never getting paler, was ready to lead any forlorn hope. A superstitious nature, which, at the outset of the war, had convinced him that he must be killed in the first charge, now, as the result of his survival, gave him all the faith of Eugene Aronson that the bullet would never be made that could kill him.
"Was the attack general all along the front?" some one asked. "We couldn't tell. All we knew was the hell around us."
"Yes," answered the judge's son.
"Did we accomplish anything?"
"A few minor positions, I believe."
"But we will win!" said Peterkin. "The colonel said so."
"And the news--what is the news?" demanded the barber's son. "You needn't be afraid," he added. "The officers are on the other side of the redoubt. They get sick of the sight of us and we of them and this is their recess and ours from the eternal digging."
"Yes, the news from home!"
"Yes, from home! We don't even get letters any more. They've shut off all the mails."
"I met a man from our town," said the judge's son. "He said that after that story was published in the press about Hugo's damning patriotism and hurrahing for the Browns--it was fearfully exaggerated--his old father and mother shut themselves up in the house and would not show their faces for shame. But his sweetheart, however much her parents stormed, refused to renounce him. She held her head high and said that the more they abused him the more she loved him, and she knew he could do nothing wrong."
"Hugo was not a patriot. It takes red blood to make a patriot!" said Peterkin. In the pride of heroism and prestige, he was becoming an oracular enunciator of commonplaces from the lips of his superiors.
"The absence of any word from the front only increases the suspense of the people. They do not know whether their sons and brothers and husbands are living or dead," continued the judge's son.
"Up to a week ago they let us write," said Pilzer, "though they wouldn't let us say anything except that we were well."
"That was because it might give information to the enemy," said Peterkin.
"As if I didn't know that!" grumbled Pilzer. "The enemy seems to be always ready for us, anyway," he added.
"The chief of staff stopped the letters because he said that mothers who received none took it for granted that their sons were dead," explained the judge's son. "Besides, he asserts that casualties are not heavy and asks for patience in the name of patriotism."
"The--!" exclaimed Pilzer, referring to Westerling. He who had set out to be an officers' favorite had become bitter against all officers, high and low.
Peterkin was speechlessly aghast. The others said nothing. They were used to Pilzer's oaths and obscenity, with a growing inclination to profanity on their own part. Besides, they rather agreed with his view of the chief of staff.
"Did you see many dead and wounded?" asked a very tired voice, that of one of the older reservists who was emaciated, with a complexion like blue mould.
"How can I tell you what I saw? Ought I to tell you?"
"When you've had to wipe a piece of brains out of your eye, as I have--it was warm and jelly-like," said Pilzer, "you ain't as squeamish as Hugo Mallin. I wonder they don't give him a bronze cross!"
"Bronze crosses are given for bravery in action," said Peterkin in his new-fashioned parrot way since he had become great. "You should not do anything to affect the spirit of corps."
"The boy wonder from the butler's pantry! Our dear, natty little buttons! Bullets glide off him!" snarled Pilzer, who had set out to win a bronze cross, only to see it won by a pygmy.
"Did you see many dead and wounded?" persisted the very tired voice of the old reservist.
"Yes, yes--and every kind of destruction!" answered the judge's son. "And--I kept thinking of Hugo Mallin."
"I'm glad they didn't shoot Hugo," said the very tired voice. "I'm sorry for his old father and mother. I'm a father myself."
"I certainly had a good farewell kick at him!" declared Pilzer. "Lean on yourself!" he added, giving a shove to the old reservist who was next him.
"I saw men who had ceased to be human. That reminds me, Pilzer," the judge's son went on, "I saw one wounded man, lying beside another, turn and strike him, and he said: 'I had to hit somebody or something!' And I heard a wounded man who was waiting in line before the surgeon's table say: 'There's others hurt worse than me. I can wait.' I heard men begging the doctors to put them out of their misery. I saw two dead men with their hands clasped as they were when they died. Then there were the men who went mad. One had to be held by force. He kept crying with demoniacal laughs: 'I want to go back and kill--kill! Let's all kill, kill, kill!' Another insisted on dancing, despite a bandaged leg. 'Look, look at the little red spots!' he was saying. 'You must step on one every time; if you don't, the automatic will get you!' Another declared that he had been through hell and insisted that he would live forever now. Another was an artist, a landscape-painter, who had lost his eyesight. He was seeing beautiful landscapes, and the nurses had to strap him to his cot to keep him from struggling to his feet and trying to use an imaginary brush on imaginary canvases. He died seeing beautiful landscapes.
"A pretty dreary sight, too, was the field of the dead, as I called it. As the bodies were brought in they were laid in long rows, until there was no more room without moving a supply depot. So there was nothing to do but begin to pile them two deep. A service-corps man took off each man's metal identification tag and tossed it into an ammunition box. One box was already full and a second half full. Chink-chink-chink--tags of the rich man's son and the poor man's son, the doctor of philosophy and the illiterate; chink-chink-chink--a life each time. They'll take the tags to the staff office and tired clerks will find the names that go with the numbers."
"You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs," said Peterkin, quoting high authority. "Some have to be killed."
"The last I heard from home my wife and one of the children were sick and my employer had gone bankrupt," broke in the very tired voice rather irrelevantly.